The Bramall Papers

Reflections on War and Peace

Bramall

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526725653
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Biografías militares

Over the course of his 75 year career Field Marshal Bramall or Dwin as he is universally known has been in the forefront of military thinking. Clearly destined to reach the pinnacle of his profession he shone in a succession of prestigious appointments both in command and on the staff. He fought in Normandy, saw active service in Ireland and Borneo and masterminded the Falklands Campaign.As this unique collection of personal Papers, dating from the 1950s to the present day, testify, Bramall has never shied away from controversy or original thought, whether on low level leadership or higher military strategy.His views are far from predictable or trenchant as demonstrated by his changing nuclear stance and his clearly argued opposition in the House of Lords to intervention in Iraq.The publication of this unique collection of letters, lectures, speeches and theses on a wide range of topics gives the reader the opportunity to delve into a rich mine of sound military thinking and common sense.

Book 1

Total War and Man’s Excessive Inhumanity to Man

Chronology

1939
1 September	Germany invades Poland.
3 September	Britain declares war.
1940
9 April	Germany invades Norway.
2 May	Britain evacuates Central Norway.
10 May	Churchill becomes Prime Minister. Germany invades France and the Low Countries.
3 June	Evacuation begins from Dunkirk.
7 June	Narvik evacuated.
11 June	Italy declares war on Britain and France.
22 June	France capitulates.
10 July	Battle of Britain starts.
13 September	Italy invades Egypt.
28 October	Italy invades Greece.
31 October	Battle of Britain ends.
9 December	British offensive in North Africa starts.
1941
4 January	British invasion of Italian East Africa.
7 February	Italian army surrenders at Beda Fomm.
28 March	Battle of Matapan (Greece).
30 March	Rommel’s first offensive in North Africa.
16 May	Duke of Aosta surrenders in Italian East Africa.
27 May	Crete evacuated.
22 June	Operation Barbarossa: German invasion of Russia.
18 November	Operation Crusader: British offensive in North Africa.
7 December	Japan attacks Pearl Harbor. Hitler declares war on the USA.
22 December	Arcadia conference in Washington.
1942
21 January	Rommel’s second offensive in North Africa.
15 February	Fall of Singapore.
8 March	Fall of Rangoon.
8 May	Battle of the Coral Sea.
4–7 May	Battle of Midway.
26 May	Rommel attacks at Gazala.
30 May	First thousand-bomber raid on Cologne.
24 July	Combined Chiefs of Staff agree strategy for 1942–3.
7–8 August	Changes in British high command in North Africa.
12–16 August	Churchill in Moscow.
23 October	Battle of El Alamein begins.
2 November	Russian counter-attack starts at Stalingrad.
7–8 November	Operation Torch: Allied landings in North Africa.
1943
14–24 January	Casablanca Conference.
23 January	Capture of Tripoli.
2 February	German surrender at Stalingrad.
7 May	Capture of Tunis.
10 June	Invasion of Sicily.
8 September	Invasion of Italy at Salerno. Italian surrender.
1944
22 January	Anzio landings. First Battle of Rome begins.
12 February	First Battle of Monte Cassino starts.
30 March	Battles of Kohima and Imphal start.
11 May	Second battle of Rome begins.
22 May	Japanese withdrawal from Imphal starts.
4 June	Capture of Rome.
6 June	Operation Overlord: invasion of Northern France.
20 July	Attempted assassination of Hitler fails.
13 August	Battle of Falaise begins.
15 August	Operation Anvil: Allied invasion of Southern France.
19 August	Allies enter Paris.
8 September	Assault on the Gothic Line in Italy opens.
17 September	Battle of Arnhem starts.
1 October	Fourteenth Army offensive in Burma starts.
16–25 October	German counter-offensive in the Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge.
1945
17 January	Russians enter Warsaw.
4–11 February	Yalta Conference.
22–24 March	Allies cross the Rhine.
2 May	Germans surrender in Italy.
9 May	VE Day.
17 June	Potsdam Conference begins.
6 August	Atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
2 September	VJ Day.

Introduction

On D+1, 7 June 1944, as a 20-year-old Second Lieutenant commanding an infantry platoon, Bramall landed on JUNO beach on the Normandy coast. There followed three months of fierce fighting with casualties similar to those of the First World War (a total of 500,000 on both sides), and after a crack German Army suffered a major defeat south-east of Falaise, the Allies were over the River Seine and poised to advance rapidly through North-East France into Belgium and Southern Holland, exactly as had been predicted by the land Commander-in-Chief, General Montgomery.

Bramall then took part in the hard-fought winter campaign, culminating in the crossing of the Rhine and the advance across North-West Germany. He witnessed the appalling effects of Total War on a defeated enemy, as well as the horrific evidence of the Nazis’ crimes against humanity. Within two months of the end of the war in Europe he was posted to the Far East, where he saw the results of the fire-bombing of Japanese cities and the destruction wrought by nuclear weapons.

Bramall’s experience of all this puts him in a rather special position to comment in depth on these events, analyse the campaign in North-West Europe and identify himself closely with the establishment of a permanent exhibition within the Imperial War Museum to remember the Holocaust, which Winston Churchill described as ‘probably the greatest and most horrible crime ever committed in the whole history of the world’.1

Chapter 1

Normandy and the NW Europe Campaigns, 1944–5

(a) The Higher Command Structure and Commanders

At a conference at the RAF Staff College, Bracknell, on 25 March 1994 Bramall was invited to give a presentation on ‘The Higher Command Structure and the Commanders’ in the Normandy campaign. This was later published in Overlord 1944 by the RAF Historical Society.

In speaking to you about the command arrangements for Operation OVERLORD I shall start by showing how the outline Command setup looked on paper; and then explain how it was arrived at and, more importantly, how it worked in practice.

At the top of the structure was SHAEF (Supreme HQ Allied Expeditionary Force) at Bushey Park, with a Supreme Commander and a Deputy Supreme Commander. Below them – at Portsmouth, in London initially, and at Stanmore – were three Cs-in-C for naval, land and air forces, who would work together in all the planning stages, and command or control their respective forces. The land C-in-C (also C-in-C British 21st Army Group, with its US increment) was made responsible for co-ordinating the whole land battle and commanding the British, Canadian and American armies until the breakout had been achieved and a second (US) Army Group (12th Army Group) could be inserted; at this moment (still then to be determined) both those Army Groups would operate directly under the Supreme Commander.

Then under their respective Cs-in-C were:

a. Two Naval Task Forces, one British and one American, with assault and bombardment forces for each of the five beaches and a follow-up force for each national sector.

b. Two assault armies, 2nd British and 1st US, each initially of two Corps.

c. Two follow-up armies, 1st Canadian and 3rd US.

d. Two Tactical Air Forces, both at Uxbridge, 2nd British and 19th US, to give direct air support to the British and American land forces – together with an RAF airborne/transport force. The Allied Expeditionary Air Forces also had a call on the independent strategic bomber force of Bomber Command and 8th US Air Force.

All quite straightforward, you might say, so did it work? Well, of course it did, because the whole operation was ultimately triumphantly successful and even caught up with the original time schedule – but not exactly as smoothly and harmoniously as one might have hoped. This was because, whatever command set-up you had on paper, you were dealing with powerful personalities, all with their own idiosyncrasies, likes and antagonisms; at the height of the war, with past personal experiences influencing their judgement, personal relationships could be quite significant. The result was that, although up to and including D-Day all the planning problems were solved and command decisions were taken without too much trouble (although some rather late), within the first week of the landing cracks had begun to appear in the relationships between the air and the ground commanders. First let me briefly go back to how these appointments came to be made. The top job of Supreme Allied Commander might have become an Allied tug of war, because General Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and Chairman of the British Chiefs of Staff Committee, hoped to be given the job. And indeed, Winston Churchill said he would back him for it. But the Americans were adamant that there should be an American in overall command. This was partly because, after the British Chiefs of Staff’s (quite correct) reluctance to contemplate a landing in north-west Europe in 1942 or even in 1943 (preferring to develop the Mediterranean Theatre), they still had some doubts about our enthusiasm for the whole enterprise; and also because, after the initial bridgehead battle, their troops would outnumber the British and Canadians.

General Marshall (the great Chief of the US Army Staff) was at one time considered, but President Roosevelt felt that he could not be spared from Washington. So, with Churchill’s eventual agreement, the popular Eisenhower, who had proved himself a good co-ordinator of diverse Allied factions in North Africa and the Mediterranean, was selected. Although Eisenhower lacked experience of the actual battlefield and of commanding land forces, as a Supreme Commander, capable of taking the big decisions and welding the Allies into a team, he was obviously a good choice. This meant that his deputy should be British and, in view of the great importance of the air plan and the air battle, it logically had to be a British airman, for which the obvious selection (as well as Eisenhower’s own preference) was the brilliant, intellectual and sharp Air Chief Marshal Tedder, who had commanded successfully the Allied air forces in the Mediterranean.

The Naval Commander-in-Chief also pretty well chose himself. Admiral Ramsay had got the British Army out of Dunkirk, put the Allies ashore in Sicily and was the Royal Navy’s leading expert on large scale combined operations. Energetic, realistic and innovative, he was just the man to assemble and deploy the great armada of British and American ships, get them across the Channel without enemy interruption and land the forces safely on the other side. All this, with the Air Forces’ help, he did with conspicuous success and indeed continued to support the land forces very significantly with devastatingly accurate naval bombardment in the crucial bridgehead battle.

For the assault and bridgehead battle itself, the overall land forces commander was clearly crucial. The tactical battle had to be co-ordinated by one man, working to a master plan, and since the British had both the more experienced battlefield commanders and the greater number of troops in the assault phase, it clearly had to be a ‘Brit’. Eisenhower (and to some extent Churchill, who much admired him) wanted for the job the brave, urbane and laid-back Harold Alexander, because not surprisingly it was thought that he would be easier to handle than the abrasive, egotistical and supremely self-confident Bernard Montgomery. But Alexander was not a patch on Montgomery as a strategist and manager of a battlefield; this was fully recognised by Brooke, who persuaded Churchill that Alexander should remain in Italy and that Montgomery should be appointed to OVERLORD and brought back as soon as possible to put his own stamp on the preliminary plans drawn up by the OVERLORD planners under General Freddie Morgan.

What a fortunate decision this was, because I believe that as much as any other single factor the personality, self-confidence and professional leadership of Montgomery contributed to the success of this great and ambitious enterprise which, if it had failed, could have postponed the end of the war indefinitely.

What Monty did was to take a plan that would not have worked, convert it into one on a broader front (two armies up), with more assault divisions and a quicker build-up, and invigorate and give firm direction and grip to a staff which was confused and uncertain. Then, by endless morale-boosting visits to military and civilian audiences alike, culminating in the epic briefing to senior OVERLORD commanders at St Paul’s School, in front of the King and the Prime Minister, he convinced everyone – commanders, the ordinary soldiers and the country at large – that the ‘Second Front’ was a feasible operation and was going to be triumphantly successful. Churchill had doubts, so did Brooke and Eisenhower, but Monty’s self-confidence never faltered. We were going to win, and certainly all of us about to take part in OVERLORD were greatly heartened and inspired by that confidence. It was electric, and leadership of the highest quality. Little did we know what a close-run thing it was going to be in certain respects.

At the same time, particularly in his briefing at St Paul’s, Monty showed that he was a realist. He knew his opponent, Rommel, respected his calibre and realised that, as quickly as possible, Rommel would use his armoured forces to try to drive the embryo bridgeheads into the sea. He appreciated that the fundamental problem was how to bring in forces fast enough over the beaches and through the Mulberry Harbours to be assembled at Arromanches, so as to match the German build-up which would benefit from their interior lines of communication. So not only did he have a deception plan to persuade the Germans that they could not weaken their Fifteenth Army in the Pas de Calais, but above all there had to be a major air effort, not only to win the air battle and create the right conditions for the landing, but also to interdict the battlefield to prevent the German forces arriving there, or at least arriving in any shape to exert their proper effectiveness. In this respect, the barriers of the Seine to the east and the Loire to the south were to prove invaluable.

Monty, despite his later contretemps with some of the air commanders, did understand air power. Indeed, he was one of the f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Foreword by Sir Anthony Seldon
• Prologue
• Book 1. Total War and Man’s Excessive Inhumanity to Man
• Book 2. Cold War and Nuclear Deterrence
• Book 3. The Changing Face of Conflict: De-escalation from an Apocalypse, Limited and Revolutionary War, Insurgency, Terrorism and Peacekeeping
• Book 4. Evolving Future Strategy: Constraints on Violence, Dynamic Diplomacy, and Intervention Operations
• Book 5. The Higher Organization of Defence
• Book 6. Leadership
• Appendix: Holders of Office, 1945–2017
• Notes
• Editor’s Acknowledgements
• Plate section